Here are some videos of Acholi music and dance:
Below are the prompts for the take home part of the midterm. Choose only one prompt. The essay will be due on Tuesday, July 27.
Today (7/21) we moved on to African literature, specifically Things Fall Apart. I'm pleased that I was able to find an image from the movie that we saw today. Having been done in 1987, the movie (or mini-series) is just old enough not to have much about it on the internet. Below is a link to an interview with Pete Edochie, the actor who played Okonkwo. Underneath the bombast and politics he does talk about the experience of filming Achebe's novel:
http://www.thesourceng.com/Thingsapartseptember8.htm
OK, I've found a good summary of the entire series from African Movies Direct:
http://www.africanmoviesdirect.com/product_info.php?products_id=43036
Below are the scenes that we watched in class:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MEDIAFRICTV#p/u/49/5ZijfjuYftw
http://www.youtube.com/user/MEDIAFRICTV#p/u/48/qBy0-08uw3o
In addition to watching these scenes from the 1987 Nigerian mini-series, we also discussed Achebe's depiction of Africa, Igbo society, and Okonkwo as an individual.
Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Black Woman" and "Prayer to the Masks" will also be on the exam. See the following link for his obituary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1722156.stm
The BBC also has some interesting links to articles about France's relationship to its former colonies as well as to information about Senegal.
Here is the original French of "Black Woman" or "Femme Noire":
http://www.clubsoleil.net/beaute_noire/senghor.htm
See the link below for the original "Prayer to the Masks" or "Priere aux masques":
http://poemasenfrances.blogspot.com/2004/11/lopold-sdar-senghor-prire-aux-masques.html
Below is a map of Senegal.
On Thursday (7/22), we continued discussing Things Fall Apart. I mentioned the Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) who is a useful theorist for reading Achebe's novel. Bakhtin considered the novel to be the apex of literature because it could include many different voices. I called this polyphony, but it may also be called heteroglossia. In fact, that is the term that Bakhtim used. Sandy Kuo's outline is fairly technical, but it is among the more useful sources I could find:
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/marxism/Bakhtin_heteroglossia.htm
This page from the University of Singapore is also useful; plus, it is more concise:
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/maslin/The_Novel_716.html
After I introduced Bakhtin's idea, we looked at how heteroglossia plays out in Things Fall Apart, specifically when the third-person narration moves to Ikemefuna. However, as you pointed out, there are other parts where we hear voices other than Okonkwo or the omniscient narrator ('voice of God").
We watched the following videos of Igbo dance:
The first is of dancing at an Igbo funeral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xvnjo8xckQ&feature=related
These dancers wear masks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrWu7Dp3Ea0
These we used to look at the funeral in chapter 13.
How would you respond to Okonkwo's accident in chapter 13? How does Achebe wish us to respond? Consider Oberieka's thoughts at the end of chapter 13, another moment of heteroglossia.
We talked about Okonkwo's exile in his mother's hometown.
We concluded by considering Things Fall Apart as a tragedy and as a naturalistic novel. For the definition of tragedy that I used, see the following link:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/tragedy.html
For the definition of naturalism, see this link:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/6intro.html
Okonkwo's conflict with his father and his son Nwoye are also important. Consider that at the time when Achebe wrote this novel Freudian psychology had much credibility and currency. A man's conflict with his father (the Oedipus conflict) was seen as an inevitable stage of a male child's life. (Note that Oedipus is a key figure in tragedy. Perhaps he is the ultimate tragic hero.)
Today (7/28) we finished up Things Fall Apart. We began by looking at the impact of orality. Orality encompasses the characteristics of a culture without a system of writing. Once a culture has a system of writing, it is literate. Once it has printing, we may refer to it as a print culture.
For more detailed information about Orality and Literacy, a key study by Father Walter J. Ong, S.J., see the link below:
http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/51
Below are Acholi dancers.
And of course, the picture below is a map of Uganda.
Link
Also, Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" will be on the midterm:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.html
I didn't know that this poem was inspired by the Spanish-American War. This war heralded the U.S.' entry into imperialism as it took over several of Spain's colonies: the Phillippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, for example.
We also discussed the impact of historical context. Note that over eighty years separate Heart of Darkness and Fitzcarraldo. These more than eighty years include both World Wars, independence for a very many former colonies, and the Civil Rights movement. Then we can also look at cultural differences. Conrad was a former Russian subject who chose to become a British citizen. Herzog was born during WWII, grew up in West Germany, and now lives in Los Angeles (but is not an American citizen). One might also call him a citizen of the world as his work transcends the category of German or American cinema.
Note that Heart of Darkness has a frame narration. An unnamed Englishman narrates the frame story. In this story, his friend Marlow tells about his journey on the Congo River to rescue Kurtz, an agent for the Belgian company that Marlow once worked for. Can we trust the unnamed Englishman? Who is he? Can we trust Marlow?
Below is a picture from Apocalypse Now. Here Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando, the shaven-headed man) and Willard (Marlow's name in the film) are conversing.
On Monday (7/19), we continued our exploration of Heart of Darkness, using Joseph Campbell's monomyth, Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa," and Werner Herzog's comments on the jungle to help us get further.
How does Marlow's story follow the hero's journey? And, if it does, what is Marlow's elixir? How does it not follow the hero's journey? Is he a hero? Would Campbell consider him to be a hero? Or is he more of an anti-hero?
Below is Dr. Kenneth Wheeler's definition of an anti-hero:
ANTIHERO: A protagonist who is a non-hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero. While the traditional hero may be dashing, strong, brave, resourceful, or handsome, the antihero may be incompetent, unlucky, clumsy, dumb, ugly, or clownish. Examples here might include the senile protagonist of Cervantes' Don Quixote or the girlish knight Sir Thopas from Chaucer's "Sir Thopas." In the case of the Byronic and Miltonic antihero, the antihero is a romanticized but wicked character who defies authority, and becomes paradoxically ennobled by his peculiar rejection of virtue. In this sense, Milton presents Satan in Paradise Lost as an antihero in a sympathetic manner. The same is true of Heathcliffe in Emily Bronté's Wuthering Heights. Compare with the picaro {or "knave or rascal who is the protagonist in picaresque novels" or novels about a young man's misadventures}.
Below is Gustave Dore's illustration of Satan in Paradise Lost. Dore was active during the 19th century.
We also began to look at Marlow's depiction of women, beginning with his aunt (one of his helpers) and moving onto Kurtz' African mistress and his European fiancee. Why does Marlow depict these women (especially his aunt) the way he does? Why does he take pains to say that women are removed from the "world" and that they should not run things? Why does he lie to Kurtz' Intended (the fiancee) about her beloved's last words?
Here are some pictures of the New Woman (1890s/1900s). The first is from 1911 and was part of a paper published in ...Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. See the link below for the paper itself: http://ncgsjournal.com/issue32/roundtable.htm
The other pictures are earlier, dating from the 1890s. Although we take for granted women's ability to work outside the home and to exercise, these activities were once radical! Again, remember what I said about the corset, which physically deformed and confined women.
We then examined some passages from Heart of Darkness, using Achebe's essay and Herzog's comments to find the effects of racism and the jungle. Could Herzog's comments be in and of themselves racist or imperialist? How might Marlow's fireman look from another perspective? (The picture below is from Mother Jones and depicts Congolese "dandies.")
Note the effect that work has on both Marlow and his subordinates. (You may also want to see what he says about the Europeans and their attitude towards work.)
I'll conclude here with notes from Tuesday (7/20) since we finished up Heart of Darkness and we will be beginning Things Fall Apart on Wednesday (7/21).
At the beginning (or near beginning of class), Michelle gave her presentation on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories (i.e., The Hound of the Baskervilles) *and* The Crime of the Congo, an expose of Belgian (mis)rule. Unlike Conrad, ACD was a very prolific, popular writer. As Michelle pointed out, he wrote not only the Sherlock Holmes stories but also science fiction, romances, and non-fiction. He trained as a physician and went to Africa as a ship's doctor, but he chose to write instead of practice medicine after his return to Great Britain. ACD wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1909 after both Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad turned the assignment down. Not only did ACD write this book but he also publicized it, meeting with world leaders and lecturing on it to the public.
Below is his portrait from 1897.
I will be posting Michelle's PowerPoint as soon as I am able to. In the meantime, here is a link to the site where The Crime of the Congo is posted.
After watching the natives pulling the Molly-Aida up the mountain and down again, I really wanted to take another look at Les Blank's documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams. If any film deserved its own documentary when it came out, Fitzcarraldo certainly did. It was quite an undertaking.
This session we'll be headed back to where movies (about vampires) began...the German film director F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) or Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
As you can see from the picture of Rosa Rio from the 1930s, movie theaters back then could be fairly elaborate.
It's interesting to note that almost all of the scenes I can find are of Max Schreck's Nosferatu!
The works of the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o have intrigued me for a while because, for the past thirty-plus years, he has chosen to write them in Gikiyu, an African language, rather than in English. Gikiyu being his first language, he believes that it is more appropriate for his writing and for African literature. He views English as a colonizers' language that has been imposed on him. (He and Chinua Achebe disagree on this.) However, NwT is his own translator, which solves some of the problems of transmission. (Note that Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, chose to write in English, rather than in Polish, and that he did not translate his own works into his first language.)
Below is a picture of a woman picking tea in Limuru, NwT's hometown. I was surprised to see that it was less than twenty miles from Nairobi, Kenya's capital. 
This summer I was able to read NwT's novel, Petals of Blood. This book is the last one he composed in English. It is set in Ilmorog, a fictional Kenyan village that becomes a boomtown over the course of the novel. Events take place during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after Kenya becomes independent. Ostensibly, the story is something of a murder mystery as at the beginning, three wealthy men have been killed in a fire. However, NwT's narrative focuses more on the paths that four friends take over the course of a dozen years. These friends are Munira, a teacher from a wealthy family; Wanja, a businesswoman who becomes the madam of a brothel; Abdulla, Wanja's former partner; and Karega, a union organizer whom she once loved. Each man is a suspect in the deaths of the three wealthy men, and each of the wealthy men was involved with Wanja. (The fire occurred at her mansion.) Interestingly, NwT finished up this novel in 1977 at a Soviet writers' colony. (The USSR hadn't yet fallen.)
Below is a picture of the count's encounter with Lucy's husband, Jonathan Harker, a naive real estate agent. At this point, the two men are in the count's castle in Transylvania.
Here we see Lucy wandering throughout the city of Wisnau as she seeks to rescue her husband once he has returned from Count Dracula's castle. Do you see the rats in the background?
The rats have arrived in the city with the count and his coffin-laden ship. Naturally, all of the humans on the ship are dead...or undead. By the way, officials in Delft, the Dutch city where Herzog began filming Nosferatu, forced him to stop because of the rats. Perhaps there is something to be said for CGI.
